Infants' Acquisition of Word Order: A Comparative Study with Turkish Participants

This thesis provides a thorough investigation into the process of early language acquisition, with a specific focus on how infants with Turkish-speaking backgrounds perceive and utilize word order in their native language. This theory is based on the idea that babies use the frequency of words to distinguish between functor words and content words. They then associate these cues with the correct word order patterns that are specific to their language environment. The study introduces an innovative method of investigation by utilizing an adapted online artificial grammar learning paradigm. Initially, the study involved 29 infants who were Turkish-speaking. Technical problems led to more precise analysis including a group of 15 newborns. Although the research did not find a statistically significant preference for either functor-initial or functor-final structures, there is an indication of a possible inclination towards functor-final word order. This observation aligns with previous research, such as the one conducted by Gervain et al. (2008), which also found comparable preferences among Japanese infants. The implications of these findings are various, providing insights into the significance of linguistic typology in language acquisition and the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this essential human ability. This thesis offers insights to the fields of developmental psychology and linguistics by connecting linguistic typology with the empirical research of language development. This highlights the necessity for additional investigation in this field, specifically the incorporation of varied linguistic backgrounds to enhance our understanding of universal versus language-specific aspects of language acquisition.